Bendy pipes on yer choofers (and other fancy stuff)
Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2016 7:15 pm
Been thinking about this lately, for situations when I want to do pipework with graphics instead of verts. For instance, that revamp of the BR39 I was playing with back before we could use Blender. It wouldn't be that hard to finish now, but needs a lot of fancy pipes stuck to the boiler, etc.
My PS skills aren't that great, but I found some tuts which are very helpful. Obviously I had to sort through a lot of crap ones before finding the good ones, but you get that. I figure having a thread to link up handy tutorials for all sort of skinning niggles would be useful. Doesn't have to be just Photoshop of course. Tips for any app would be handy.
Basic straight pipes are pretty easy.
Curved pipes are trickier, and had me stumped. So this tutorial, which I haven't tried yet, looks very useful: How to Create Bent Pipes in Photoshop. Obviously the advantage of this one is that you can lay out any complex path quickly and easily with a few mouse clicks.
This one looks great for if you need corrugated pipes around a bend: Segmented Pipes.
This last one is nifty too: New to me! Gradient on a path! This one lets you get a gradient that follows the pipework around any bend. The result isn't perfect at large scale, because the shading of the gradient follows the pipe around instead of changing as it would with a real light angle, if that makes sense. However, it's good enough for a general effect on small scale skinning work.
The only catch here is that even if the path is laid out with a solid colour (such as using the line tool set to green at 100% opacity) the application of the stroke/gradient/shape burst trick somehow renders the line translucent**. This is a problem for pipes the cross each other, or where you have a changing background colour beneath the layer. To get around this, I found it necessary to have a duplicated layer underneath the pipe which was just a plain solid colour. That fixes it.
**Edit: Ha! I figured out why the pipes were going translucent. Some idiot had left his stroke blending mode on "Multiply". Change it back to "Normal" and the pipes are nice and solid, just like they should be. Then you don't need the extra layer underneath.
To make that one, I used this trick to add straight extensions on the curved bits: Merge Photoshop Shapes into One Combined Shape.
Edit: and this looks handy for doing lotsa rivets: Rivets: The easy way.
My PS skills aren't that great, but I found some tuts which are very helpful. Obviously I had to sort through a lot of crap ones before finding the good ones, but you get that. I figure having a thread to link up handy tutorials for all sort of skinning niggles would be useful. Doesn't have to be just Photoshop of course. Tips for any app would be handy.
Basic straight pipes are pretty easy.
Curved pipes are trickier, and had me stumped. So this tutorial, which I haven't tried yet, looks very useful: How to Create Bent Pipes in Photoshop. Obviously the advantage of this one is that you can lay out any complex path quickly and easily with a few mouse clicks.
This one looks great for if you need corrugated pipes around a bend: Segmented Pipes.
This last one is nifty too: New to me! Gradient on a path! This one lets you get a gradient that follows the pipework around any bend. The result isn't perfect at large scale, because the shading of the gradient follows the pipe around instead of changing as it would with a real light angle, if that makes sense. However, it's good enough for a general effect on small scale skinning work.
The only catch here is that even if the path is laid out with a solid colour (such as using the line tool set to green at 100% opacity) the application of the stroke/gradient/shape burst trick somehow renders the line translucent**. This is a problem for pipes the cross each other, or where you have a changing background colour beneath the layer. To get around this, I found it necessary to have a duplicated layer underneath the pipe which was just a plain solid colour. That fixes it.
**Edit: Ha! I figured out why the pipes were going translucent. Some idiot had left his stroke blending mode on "Multiply". Change it back to "Normal" and the pipes are nice and solid, just like they should be. Then you don't need the extra layer underneath.
To make that one, I used this trick to add straight extensions on the curved bits: Merge Photoshop Shapes into One Combined Shape.
Edit: and this looks handy for doing lotsa rivets: Rivets: The easy way.